Day 3

I spent the morning in Zambia - not literally, unfortunately, but filewise. I was working on developing a tool (i.e. spreadsheet) to help keep the Zambia field team on track. I also organized a bunch of Activity Status Reports for Zambia and Madagascar. This kind of work involves picking through documents that have been scanned so poorly that you can barely read them, looking for a certain date or number to verify another date or number on another piece of paper. Mostly, I think this stuff is very boring (and also frustrating because you can almost never find the piece of information you need). Every so often you run across an interesting fact or figure, but still. Are there not robots? Is the computer not a robot?

I was temporarily released from the holds of budgets and contracts when my boss suggested we go to a brown bag lunch presentation on malaria in southern Sudan. Most presentations that come to PSI are, as I might have guessed, pretty business oriented. This one, however, was a photo documentary of PSI's recent (and successful) efforts to deliver 1,000,000 mosquito nets to southern Sudan. There was some NGO lingo that went over my head, but I think I got the gist of it.

The campaign was remarkable in many ways, if not just for the sheer unlikelihood of its success. Planning was held up due to several unforeseen factors, including a census that was being conducted by the government. There were also big time constraints put on the distribution by southern Sudan's rainy season, which makes mobilization almost impossible. Somehow, planning and distribution were all successfully condensed into one four month period, starting in January of 2008 and ending in April.

Frankly, I'm kind of astonished that this accomplishment hasn't recieved more press. This is the first time mosquito nets have ever been given out for free in southern Sudan (also surprising). These nets are intended to cover 2 people, and officials estimate that it will take about 6 million more nets, with 2-3 people sleeping under each one, to fully protect the population of southern Sudan. PSI hopes to complete such a distribution by 2011.

We had the photographer and several of the team leaders with us for the talk, and then for the Q&A session. One woman asked "Did you try to use distribution sites for other kinds of education as well because you had such large numbers of women in one place at the same time?" The answer to that was a resounding no - let people worry about their mosquito nets, don't overcomplicate things. There were also lots of questions about proper usage - had there been net-hanging lessons, what kind of follow up was being done, etc... And then one guy said "I was having a talk with someone the other day about how the people in southern Sudan use these nets on their cows because they value their livestock more than their children. Are you doing anything about that?"

Today was a whirlwind, which I maybe should have seen coming when my train got stuck behind a broken one first thing this morning. It was gratifying to see some of what PSI does in a tangible, real world context. Also, I am out of staples.

You can watch photographer Jenn Warren's photo documentary 1,000,000 Nets: Fighting Malaria in South Sudan here.